Moncton edtech company EduCode Academy has named Foreign Scope Consultants as its first national franchisee for India.

EduCode creates online courses that help children learn to code, and its international sales soared last year as the result of a free service it offered in the depths of the pandemic. That offer ended in June, but sales continued to increase.

Led by Subhojeet Sadhu, Foreign Scope will be charged with building up a franchise network in India, by attracting and supporting independent state and local franchisees throughout the country. These regional franchises will promote and sell EduCode Academy's coding courses to local schools and coding camp organizations within their assigned territories.

"India has been identified as one of our key target markets, not just due to its size, but also because of their federal government's recognition of the importance of computer science,” said EduCode CEO Peter Hess in a statement. “Their government recently announced that coding will now be a required curriculum subject for its schools."

Hess added that the company’s strategy is to work with existing in-country distributors, which have pre-existing relationships within target markets.

“Besides India, we have a growing group of distributors in Canada and the U.S.A., the U.A.E., Asia and Africa and are in discussions with a large education company in Turkey, as well as other major countries around the world," said Hess.

Sadhu brings over 16 years of experience as an entrepreneur in education and other sectors to the role.

"Students and parents in India are very interested in learning how to code, as it is seen as a crucial skill to have going into the new generation of jobs being created or about to be created," said Sadhu. "We are very proud to represent such an esteemed organization as EduCode Academy to help them bring their very unique and successful coding courses to benefit the children of India."

EduCode is the brainchild of Guyverson Vernous, now the Chair of the Board, a native of Haiti who several years ago launched Moncton-based iCubemedia, which developed digital products for small businesses.  In 2016, he began EduCode to help children learn coding through online lessons.